A Question of Style
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Hi, a TAB character moves the cursor to the next tabular position, whatever that is. on most simple editors (e.g. Notepad) and terminals and terminal emulators, tabular positions are every eight column. on some, its every fourth column (which is more suited for source code). on others (such as Visual Studio), you can specify it. BTW: on good old typewriters, each tab position was set individually where ever you wanted it; same holds true for the tab bar in text editors such as MS Word (where you can use different tab settings for different paragraphs). As a result when you create a file with embedded tabs and send it to some one who uses a different tool, or the same tool with a different setting, chances are your vertical alignments are lost. I use tabs, not spaces, and have tab positions every fourth column. Visual Studio is doing that perfectly. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
Luc Pattyn wrote:
each tab position was set individually
VT100s have that feature too, not sure of its successors, but I expect they must or they wouldn't be compatible.
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The backspace key. Spaces are great for non-modern and cross platform editors where the actual tab may not align correctly allowing properly formatted code to be the same in all editors. However, if you are exclusively using one editor it would be silly to not use tabs. There is nothing worse than having to hit the backspace key n-4 times.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.It is not hard to come up with an editor that removes 1 to 4 tabs after a single BACKSPACE input; I have seen at least one that does exactly that. Actually you couldn't tell whether it was using tabs internally and converted them to/from tabs on file I/O, or was converting tabs to spaces whenever they got entered. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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Not this again :rolleyes: Ramblings in no particular order: Because Windows and WYSIWYG and such are new-tech. I began programming with a dumb terminal, and the tabs were set there (not in software), and that remains true when I use OpenVMS (except now I use a terminal emulator). I've opened too many files only to find the code misaligned because the last person to touch it used TABs. On Windows I mostly use Edit, which gives four SPACEs per tab. I generally avoid Notepad because it keeps the TABs (eight SPACEs wide X| ). Of course, as long as a file uses one or the other and not a mixture of both it should be OK, but it's easier to untabbify than to tabbify. With SPACEs you know what you're getting.
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
With SPACEs you know what you're getting.
But at what expense: four spaces is 8 bytes nowadays, one tab used to be a single byte. No wonder the latest and hottest machines keep resembling a TRS-80. :rolleyes:
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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About the only thing it does well.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.I rather like it, the parts of it I use that is. I've seen worse, both MS and non-MS. Eclipse to name just one, it takes forever to do just anything. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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It is not hard to come up with an editor that removes 1 to 4 tabs after a single BACKSPACE input; I have seen at least one that does exactly that. Actually you couldn't tell whether it was using tabs internally and converted them to/from tabs on file I/O, or was converting tabs to spaces whenever they got entered. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
And in all the years I used EDT I never considered writing macroes to do that. :doh:
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
With SPACEs you know what you're getting.
But at what expense: four spaces is 8 bytes nowadays, one tab used to be a single byte. No wonder the latest and hottest machines keep resembling a TRS-80. :rolleyes:
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
I considered buying a 1TB hard drive last week, my current 200GB is nearly full of whitespace. At this point I write code just to delineate the whitespace. :-D
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I considered buying a 1TB hard drive last week, my current 200GB is nearly full of whitespace. At this point I write code just to delineate the whitespace. :-D
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
delineate the whitespace.
I see. That's like movies aired to keep commercials apart. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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And in all the years I used EDT I never considered writing macroes to do that. :doh:
Neither did I, EDT was just great at that time. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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Neither did I, EDT was just great at that time. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
I just did try it. Actually I found that EDT has some built-in support, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe LSE does it better.
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About the only thing it does well.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego. -
I just did try it. Actually I found that EDT has some built-in support, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe LSE does it better.
I've never really used LSE, I trust it does everything EDT did/does. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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Uuuuuhhhh... so? :confused:
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I've never really used LSE, I trust it does everything EDT did/does. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
Every time I've accidently gotten into it I've had to Ctrl-C out because I couldn't figure out the right way. :sigh:
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Every time I've accidently gotten into it I've had to Ctrl-C out because I couldn't figure out the right way. :sigh:
Doh. Don't they offer their letter-sized binders full of fancy manuals anymore? :doh:
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
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The backspace key. Spaces are great for non-modern and cross platform editors where the actual tab may not align correctly allowing properly formatted code to be the same in all editors. However, if you are exclusively using one editor it would be silly to not use tabs. There is nothing worse than having to hit the backspace key n-4 times.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.Isn't that for people who make mistakes? ;P Another plus for spaces is that I use more than one tool for viewing code. When I am manually scanning documents in a folder, I use Total Commander's viewer for really quick perusal, but it doesn't support configurable tabs. But sometimes I am editing with an IDE. Other times with TextPad. And then I switch to my VirtualBox Ubuntu session and use whatever the hell I find on that thing. Forgetting other people (hey, what geek actually cares about others?), using spaces ensures my own accesses to a file are as consistent as possible.
Don't let my name fool you. That's my job.
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What, if any, is the practical reason for preferring spaces over tabs? I use tabs because when I need to increase or decrease an indent, it's only a single character that must be added or deleted. I noticed that the Google Guidelines disallow tabs, and use only spaces. What have they got against tabs?
so if you like to do the following:
switch (foo) { case fooEasy: return 77; case fooVeryHardIndeed: return 88; default: return 11; }different tab settings screw you up royally. In other words, tabs at the beginning of the line are ok, tabs on the middle of the text are not, but such a rule would be to complicated :) Second, there is "movement through tabs". Moving the caret right over a tab - does it move one space, or one tab? I prefer the current "visualize as spaces" for consistency (another in-depth discussion). If you do that, tabs become mere space savers, which is pointless today.
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Doh. Don't they offer their letter-sized binders full of fancy manuals anymore? :doh:
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I use ListBoxes for line-oriented text, and PictureBoxes for pictures, not drawings.
I've downloaded a bunch of PDFs, LSE is part of DECset now (with CMS and MMS), so it's in there I expect. I didn't see one for EDT.
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The backspace key. Spaces are great for non-modern and cross platform editors where the actual tab may not align correctly allowing properly formatted code to be the same in all editors. However, if you are exclusively using one editor it would be silly to not use tabs. There is nothing worse than having to hit the backspace key n-4 times.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.If you are using Visual Studio, you don't have to hit backspace multiple times...that's the beauty of shift+tab. You get the advantage of readable code in any editor, with the ease of formatting tabs.
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so if you like to do the following:
switch (foo) { case fooEasy: return 77; case fooVeryHardIndeed: return 88; default: return 11; }different tab settings screw you up royally. In other words, tabs at the beginning of the line are ok, tabs on the middle of the text are not, but such a rule would be to complicated :) Second, there is "movement through tabs". Moving the caret right over a tab - does it move one space, or one tab? I prefer the current "visualize as spaces" for consistency (another in-depth discussion). If you do that, tabs become mere space savers, which is pointless today.
I also recall helping a fellow student debug a COBOL program (1989, VAX/VMS, VT100), it turned out he had a TAB within some string data and couldn't figure why the system (I forget whether or not it was a run-time error) said it didn't have enough characters.
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The backspace key. Spaces are great for non-modern and cross platform editors where the actual tab may not align correctly allowing properly formatted code to be the same in all editors. However, if you are exclusively using one editor it would be silly to not use tabs. There is nothing worse than having to hit the backspace key n-4 times.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.That is why there is a "Format Document" command (Under Edit | Advanced in VS, and in context menu in NetBeans) - so you can forget about spaces and tabs: do whatever you like to the source, than reformat entire file :-D And in multi-user environments (was Google mentioned?) spaces are the only common denominator between all editors' interpretations of what is a tab.
